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This article considers the contexts and processes of forensic identification in 2004 post-tsunami Thailand as examples of identity politics. The presence of international forensic teams as carriers of diverse technical expertise overlapped with bureaucratic procedures put in place by the Thai government. The negotiation of unified forensic protocols and the production of estimates of identified nationals straddle biopolitics and thanatocracy. The immense identification task testified on the one hand to an effort to bring individual bodies back to mourning families and national soils, and on the other hand to determining collective ethnic and national bodies, making sense out of an inexorable and disordered dissolution of corporeal as well as political boundaries. Individual and national identities were the subject of competing efforts to bring order to,the chaos, reaffirming the cogency of the body politic by mapping national boundaries abroad. The overwhelming forensic effort required by the exceptional circumstances also brought forward the socio-economic and ethnic disparities of the victims, whose post-mortem treatment and identification traced an indelible divide between us and them.
The British saw Egypt as a major route to India where their interests could be threatened in alarming ways. This book sheds light on the formation of English national identities in relation to Islam as understood in the context of the British imperial mission. It focuses on the late nineteenth century, a period that marks a new departure in Anglo-Muslim relations in the context of the British Empire shifting the ground on which British identity politics operated. The role of the British Government and English activists respectively in the campaign to suppress slave traffic in Egypt and surrounding areas is discussed. Government officials and British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) members redefined English culture and proper English gender roles. Anti-slavery campaign had as much to do with English domestic as it did with Egyptian and British imperial politics. The book examines the relationships between activism in England, the implementation of government policy in Egypt and imperial encounters, as well as the production of identities and ideologies associated with these efforts. References to the East, Islam and the harem were used to define the behaviour that the English feminists sought to eliminate from their own society as un-English. The poem 'British Turk' focuses on the oppression of English women, on the burdens associated with marriage. The book also explains how the concept of the English nation as the centre of an empire helped to establish a place in England for Islam.
This book examines the nineteenth-century ideology of 'martial races', the belief that some groups of men are biologically or culturally predisposed to the arts of war. It explores how and why Scottish Highlanders, Punjabi Sikhs and Nepalese Gurkhas became linked in both military and popular discourse as the British Empire's fiercest, most manly soldiers. The violent disruption of the Rebellion of 1857, and the bitterness with which it was fought on both sides, had effects in both Britain and India that went far beyond the cessation of hostilities. The reactions of the British and Indian armies to the European threat created the preconditions for the rise of martial race ideology and discourse. This book also argues that in addition to helping shape Victorian culture more generally, the army influenced the regional cultures of the Highlands, the Punjab and Nepal in remarkably enduring ways. The Victorian army was in fact instrumental in shaping late Victorian British popular culture. The book documents the concrete ways that the 'martial races' themselves were, in a very real sense, self-conscious constructs of the British imagination in spite of the naturalised racial and gendered language that surrounded them. The book bridges regional studies of South Asia and Britain while straddling the fields of racial theory, masculinity, imperialism, identity politics, and military studies. It challenges the marginalisation of the British Army in histories of Victorian popular culture, and demonstrates the army's enduring impact on the regional cultures of the Highlands, the Punjab and Nepal.
fighting for owned demands and those campaigning on behalf of issues could prove too great. Solidarity between activists was built, but at times it broke down over differences in identity, experience, organisational methods and spaces. Although the fusion of class and identity politics was not always successful, the new urban left was by no means a failure. As this book has shown, activists in Sheffield achieved a remarkable amount, some with financial provision and some emboldened by a local culture of general support for left
liberal-internationalist ideas to pre-existing loyalties and identities, a task which the movement’s leaders and grassroots activists often accomplished with great skill. Nonetheless, by privileging synthesis over transformation, the movement gained much in terms of quantity of support but generally failed to match it in terms of quality. Few outside the inner core of devoted activists made the League their primary source of political identification. In this respect, the LNU did not generate the sort of ‘lifestyle’ or ‘identity’ politics associated with later social
approach is necessary if we consider identities not as structures or categories, but rather as cultural processes which occur in relationships, in this case imperial relationships. 2 I focus on the late nineteenth century, a period that marks a new departure in Anglo-Muslim relations in the context of the British Empire, both in England and abroad, shifting the ground on which British identity politics operated
promoting religious reform, fostering denominational pride, and asserting their loyalty to the United Kingdom.3 These comments suggest that Presbyterians should not have been concerned with Patrick and the early Irish Church. However, from the 1830s onwards, a variety of Presbyterian writers grappled with Ireland’s patron saint and in so doing used Patrick as a means of contributing to contemporary debates about historical scholarship, Church organisation, missionary activity, and identity politics. A study of Presbyterian interpretations of Patrick in the nineteenth
Between 1598 and 1800, an estimated 3, 271 Catholic women left England to enter convents on the Continent. This study focuses more particularly upon those who became Benedictines in the seventeenth century, choosing exile in order to pursue their vocation for an enclosed life. Through the study of a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns’ own collections of notes, this book highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns’ personal experiences. Its first four chapters adopt a traditional historical approach to illustrate the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. They offer a prosopographical study of Benedictine convents in exile, and show how those houses were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home. The next fur chapters propose a different point of entry into the history of nuns, with a study of emotions and the senses in the cloister, delving into the textual analysis of the nuns’ personal and communal documents to explore aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body, which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.
The archive has assumed a new significance in the history of sex, and this book visits a series of such archives, including the Kinsey Institute’s erotic art; gay masturbatory journals in the New York Public Library; the private archive of an amateur pornographer; and one man’s lifetime photographic dossier on Baltimore hustlers. The subject topics covered are wide-ranging: the art history of homoeroticism; casual sex before hooking-up; transgender; New York queer sex; masturbation; pornography; sex in the city. The duality indicated by the book’s title reflects its themes. It is an experiment in writing an American sexual history that refuses the confines of identity sexuality studies, spanning the spectrum of queer, trans, and the allegedly ‘normal’. What unites this project is a fascination with sex at the margins, refusing the classificatory frameworks of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and demonstrating gender and sexual indecision and flexibility. And the book is also an exploration of the role of the archive in such histories. The sex discussed is located both in the margins of the archives, what has been termed the counterarchive, but also, importantly, in the pockets of recorded desire located in the most traditional and respectable repositories. The sexual histories in this book are those where pornography and sexual research are indistinguishable; where personal obsession becomes tomorrow’s archive. The market is potentially extensive: those interested in American studies, sexuality studies, contemporary history, the history of sex, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, pornography studies, visual studies, museum studies, and media studies.
This book is about cultures of history in post-war England. It explores the productions of segments of the past by people who were identified as, or came to understand themselves as, members of minority ethnic communities. These were first and second generation migrants with familial roots in parts of the former British Empire, specifically from the Caribbean, Africa and Ireland, who cumulatively produced a remarkable range of historical texts, performances, commemorations and representations. Recognising the social character of historical knowledge, this book aims to recover the labour of people such as Steve Brennan, Stella Dadzie, Bernadette Hyland, Valentine Jones, Dorothy Kuya, Ron Phillips, Pat Reynolds and hundreds of others. First, the nation state dominated identity constructions in the century between 1850 and 1950. Its myriad institutions, routines and symbols, simultaneously encouraged and suppressed particular social identities. The book traces the ways in which those new historical identities came to be applied in public spaces. Although 1981 is a somewhat arbitrary starting point, it does represent an important moment in British culture and society. It was not only the year of rioting in almost all the major urban centres in England, it was also the year of the publication of the Rampton report and of Labour's victory in the London council elections. These seemingly disparate events are connected by the significant consequences they would have for cultural and educational activity in migrant groups.